Digital Library Support for Engineering Design and Manufacturing
William Clement Regli · Volume 2: 19th Computers and Information in Engineering Conference · 1999
Abstract This paper describes our initial efforts to deploy a digital library to support engineering design and manufacturing. This experimental testbed, The Engineering Design Repository, is an effort to collect and archive public domain engineering data for use by researchers and engineering professionals. CAD knowledge-bases are vital to engineers, who search through vast amounts of corporate legacy data and navigate online catalogs to retrieve precisely the right components for assembly into new products. This research attempts to begin addressing the critical need for improved computational methods for reasoning about complex geometric and engineering information. In particular, we focus on archival and reuse of design and manufacturing data for mechatronic systems. This paper presents a description of the research problem and an overview of the initial architecture of testbed.